| Get out while you still can. |
British physicist Stephen Hawking has warned repeatedly that Earth could well be doomed, but his latest warning gives us no more than 583 years before we get burned on Earth.
During a video clip aired at the Tencent WE Summit on Sunday, the 75-year-old scientist said that humanity would have to deal with exponential growth in the centuries ahead. He noted that the world’s population has been doubling every 40 years.
“This exponential growth cannot continue into the next millennium,” Hawking, who has been coping with neurodegenerative disease for decades, said in his computer-synthesized voice. “By the year 2600, the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot.
“This is untenable,” Hawking said as a planet-sized ball of fire blazed on the screen.
Hawking suggested that humanity's best chance for survival lay in the stars, and that finding other inhabitable planets may be our only hope.
Personally I am all for space exploration and have believed for decades that it is our destiny to someday leave this planet and explore the cosmos.
However 583 years is actually cutting it a little close.
If you consider the fact that we have yet to understand how to travel any great distance from this planet and survive, while adding to that the fact we have yet to identify a planet that we know for certain can sustain life, then just for fun let's remember that also need to be able to move not a handful, but potentially millions of people, and it's starting to feel a little doomy around here.
Of course we could all just stop having so many damn babies, quickly move to renewable energy resources, and start working together to repair this planet that we have all treated like our own personal landfill for thousands of years.
Nope, our best hope is to get the hell out of Dodge before the planet burns to a crisp.
